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[droid]

why are shelters for battered women mainly filled with muslim women?

This is a perfect example of why you deserve to be called an Islamophobe.

Where did you get this information? where are the facts to back up this wild assertion? AFAIK, most womens refuges don't even release this kind of data so how do you know?

 

[vimothy]

Polz:

I have just thought of another analogy that might help explain what I am trying to get at here. Consider this: If I have to wear a tie to become a banker, does it mean that wearing a tie caused my banking success? No, it does not. Maybe “all terrorists are Muslims” (not true anyway), but that does not mean, “All Muslims are terrorists”. Some people (though probably not philosophers) call this method of reasoning the “round–trip fallacy”. You fall for a version of this fallacy. You say to yourself (and to Dissensus), “most significant violence or strife in the world today is of Muslim origin”, and therefore infer something about Muslims (not genetically but ideologically) by asking, what causes these Muslims to be violent? Well, what’s the common denominator? Of course – it’s Islam! Why does Islam cause violence? What do you know, if you actually look in the Koran, it is filled with injunctions to violence. Therefore, by induction, you know that Muslims are violent because Islam causes violence, which is because Islam is violent at its core because of the existence of violent verses, QED.

The venerable David Hume had this to say about the round-trip fallacy,

All inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past… If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance.​

For a comparative thought experiment, let’s imagine that we are aliens looking out over the world in the 10th Century. We might observe the diversity, vigour and dynamism of Islamic Civilisation and the relative stagnation and misery of Christian Civilisation. Using inductive reasoning, we would probably ask, why is it that Christian Civilisation is so much poorer culturally and economically than Islamic Civilisation? Well, what is the common denominator? It’s religion, of course! The problem of induction is one of travelling from the specific to the general. We might observe relative disparity between the two civilisations and infer from that an essential (i.e. general) problem within Christianity that causes or produces closed-mindedness and violence, for instance, and we might produce any number of Biblical quotes to support this thesis, just as the rulers of Christian countries produced Biblical scriptures to justify all kinds of unpleasant acts. We can easily see how flawed that type of thinking is, however, if we remember that we have just had exactly the same argument one thousand years later with regard to Islam.

 

[DannyL]

Vimothy, I noticed upthread (can't be bothered to look back and find exact quote) you mentioned something about the motivations of terrorists, and how hard it is to figure this out. You might find the work of Robert Pape interesting in this regard. He's an American academic who has studied suicide bombing closely.

http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html

Pape states that contrary to what Polz (and others in Western media) are arguing, Islam (and the Quran) are not actually that key when explaining suicide bombing. I think Pape's work contributes strongly to the idea that the Islam = Suicide Bombing is a falsehood and serves to obscure deeper motivations. I am not surprised to see it repeated uncritcally here by Polz because it's such a common trope, just a bit depressed.

Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

 

[vimothy]

as for the amount of time, you can ask that droid and vimothy (see his activity on the politics forum) as well.

I like arguing about politics...

 

[vimothy]

DannyL:

Thanks for the American Conservative / Robert Pape link. I'm vaguely familiar with his work but haven't got around to reading Dying to Win yet. It looks very reasonable. I've been thinking of Marc Sageman and Alan Krueger in this thread, who probably do something slightly different, but with a similar mind-set. Sageman (Understanding Terror Networks) in particular examines the biographies of hundreds of Jihadist terrosists and runs qualitative and quantitative analyses on them. Very instructive book & highly recommended.

 

[vimothy]

I'd be much keener to broaden the discussion into people's ideas about how to move towards a secular society, or how to create a culture which is more to do with class than race or religion or whatever.

Unfortunately (and confusingly), I think that neofundamentalism is the vehicle of secularisation in Islam.

 

[vimothy]

Suicide Terrorism: Origins and Response - Martin Kramer (Transcript from a debate with Robert Pape at the Washington Institute)

 

[john eden]

Unfortunately (and confusingly), I think that neofundamentalism is the vehicle of secularisation in Islam.

Heh heh. Would you care to expand? :slanted:

 

[vimothy]

Heh heh. Would you care to expand? :slanted:

I'll try to dig into this later -- it is a difficult idea to sum up quickly, but just remember that the Reformation was carried out by people who were definitely not liberal democrats, even if this was the eventual end result... Neofundamentalist Islam is a universal Islam (which explains its appeal) not rooted in one particular culture -- it's already secularised in that sense.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I therefore support the moves to do away with segregationist schooling and to remove state funding from religious schools.

Amen to that (lol).

 

[droid]

here you go (not that you will be able to read it)(the article is published by the Ministry of Justice):http://www.huiselijkgeweld.nl/doc/krant/krant4-2002.pdf

somebody from the federation of shelters for battered women (usually not conservative hate mongers) says that maroccan and turkish women make up 40-50% of the population in the shelters, while they make up 4% of the general population. Add to this Afghani, Iraqi and Somali women and you can assume its a majority.

And even if it is "only" 45%, i would still think they are highly over-representated.

So you admit youre lying? You said "why are shelters for battered women mainly filled with muslim women?". Ignoring the ridiculous statement ' Add to this Afghani, Iraqi and Somali women and you can assume its a majority' (as you have no source to back this up) - by your own admission this isnt true.

Ignoring the fact that your source is a joke, and I cant read the report or verify your claim, nor can I check to see what 'somebody from the federation of shelters for battered women' said, or who that person is, or if that claim is credible - thats a report from only one country.

Based on that, the claim that 'shelters for battered women mainly filled with muslim women?', is an utterly illogical and false generalisation, (more) evidence of prejudice, and a nasty attempt to demonise Muslims.

i think your eagerness to call me an islamophobe whenever i address stuff like this is becoming not just some style figure, but really loathsome. You're demonising me so you dont have to address what i'm saying. Should i remind you who else used this tactique and to what effect?

Ive addressed what youre saying, as have others, and you cant or wont respond so Ive repeated myself in response to your repeated and irrational claims. The idea that its loathsome to call you an Islamaphobe considering some of the statements youve made on this board betrays a remarkable talent for either irony or hypocrisy.

i guess that when John Eden said this:

he was reffering to you

LOL. I really dont think he was.

 

[droid]

the source is a joke because you cant read it? we can throw the quran out of the window then as well, cant we

If you provide a source in a language that you know others will not understand it hardly proves your point does it? That document could say anything and there is no way to check the veracity of its claims, and you have provided no other sources to verify it.

Here's a source you can read:
According to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in 2002, over 90% of married women surveyed in that country reported being kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had ‘failed’ to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.(Source: amnesty international)

Er.. I cant read it actually - did you try clicking on that link? It goes to a blank page: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/1e47f8c5-a459-11dc-bac9-0158df32ab50/asa330102002en.html

Id also like to mention that this doesn't prove your point either. You started off by claiming that womens refuges were mainly filled with Muslim women, and now, in support of that claim you say that there is a high percentage of battered women in one Muslim country... this is a disingenuous and non-nonsensical argument.

somme passages from two books written by women with an islamic background which address what im talking about

Great. Should I quote some Dworkin at you now?

No-ones denying that there is a problem with how extremist Islam treats women, but to claim that wife battering is a mainly Muslim occupation is bullshit. Womens refuges all over the world are filled with battered women - even in (gasp) non-Muslim countries. It is claimed that a women is battered every 15 seconds in the US for example.

 

[noel emits]

What do you think are the differences in a childs view of the world who is reared on either Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed?

The cultural environment a child is exposed to in its developmental stage is very significant so this is an interesting question that I don't think should be completely dismissed. It's also not that straightforward as 'environment' consists of much more than just religious ideas, and then of course interpretations vary widely. What are the effects on a child of being reared on the Star Wars and the A-Team?

 

[vimothy]

Unfortunately (and confusingly), I think that neofundamentalism is the vehicle of secularisation in Islam.

Heh heh. Would you care to expand?

Let me just restate that slightly: Neofundamentalism (fundamentalism for the purposes of this argument) is the main vehicle of secularisation in contemporary Islam, especially in Europe. To give full disclosure: this insight is really Olivier Roy’s, who said,

Islam is experiencing secularisation, but in the name of fundamentalism. It’s a bit confusing for everybody, which is quite logical so far as religion is concerned and so long as God will let us speak on His behalf. Secularisation is the unexpected but logical destiny of any mediator of a religious fundamentalism that happens to be taken seriously by a whole nation and society, from Martin Luther to Ruhollah Khomeini.​

What are we talking about when we say “secularisation”? I would call a secularised Islam a faith that is a “mere religion”: not the central font of authority and meaning for society, but a faith that is one religion among many, and knows it. Christianity and Judaism and are both examples of secularised religious faith in the UK. Interestingly, both religious communities also contain not insignificant numbers of believers who are not only intensely conservative, but might equally be described as “fundamentalist”. Apparently, religious fundamentalism is not necessarily incompatible with liberal democracy.

What is it to be a religious believer in the 21st Century? It is to be a minority group in society, whatever your faith. Even Christians in the UK are a minority group, if you understand what it is to be a “Christian”, i.e. an actual believer, not just a cultural Christian. This represents a much wider picture, which is of the changing nature of religious faith. In the modern, globalised world, religion has shifted from being inseparable from the socio-cultural-economic matrix, to being characterised by religiosity, or the personal relationship of the believer with his faith.

“Born-again Christian” means exactly that: being born into a Christian society or even family is not enough to make you a Christian (the same is not quite so true for Muslims in this country; of course), you have to make a personal commitment to religion. It’s no longer a social phenomenon. It is “disembedded” from society as a whole, an individual expression of belief, with minorities of adherents forming small communities within a wider whole. That’s simply the modern world. It requires the acceptance by religion that it doesn’t have political authority. For us all to be able to coexist peacefully, religion has to stay in its box, or boxes. Even conservative Christians in America, the most explicitly religious Western nation (it seems to me), feel like they are a minority group living in a Godless society.

Fundamentalist Islam (and Islamism) makes the distinction between a believer and a “cultural Muslim”, between Islam and wider culture. It’s no accident that some of the most reductive schools of Islam have been the most successful in the globalised marketplace. Wahhabism militantly strips Islam of cultural accretions leaving a simple and easily comprehendible, if severe, core. Muslims are shopping around constructing modern Muslim identity and they do not necessarily want or need to listen to classically trained ulema. Like modern Christians (and Martin Luther), they want a personal faith, one that is universal, one that they can understand and one that makes definitive judgements that they can live by. They don’t want tomes of theological scholarship. They don’t want to read it in Arabic or Latin. Thanks in a large part to globalisation, religious authority is in a kind of crisis. It isn’t a given any more. The largest churches in the UK are not Church of England. Traditional social authorities are displaced, and religious identity is being de-cultured and reconstructed as individual identities. It should not be a surprise that this reconstructed “born again” Muslim identity is frequently similar to our own various born again, fundamentalist, evangelical weirdoes, especially given the easily digestible nature of contemporary fundamentalist thought (to say nothing of the large amounts of Saudi funding and teachings flooding Europe). Religious hyper-conservatives will always be unpleasant. Like the scorpion, that’s their nature. But as long as they stay in their box, regardless of the supposed claims of their faith, and let the rest of us get on with it, I consider that to be the most optimal outcome next to planet-wide atheism.

 

[droid]

how poor is this. I provide a publicly accessable source, which you cant read, but others can. i truthfully translate that (including the fact that its 40-50%, knowing you would immediately say "thats not the majority, you're a liar") but still you dont trust me. When this basic trust isnt there, i see no further point in conversing with you.

Trust!? surely you jest. You've switched from one disingenuous argument to another and tried to portray yourself as a victim time and again to avoid awkward questions - as you're doing once more here. It really is a sad and cowardly tactic.

A source that cant be checked or verified (or even read) is useless. Even if I could 'trust' your translation, how could I check up on the credibility of the scholarship or the assertions it makes? And who cares anyway, since, as Ive already mentioned, it doesn't prove your point and even if it did it would only be in one isolated case.

 

[vimothy]

Smoking increases the chances of long cancer
Islam increses the chances of violence

Ok, the two statements are not the same: The first statement can be scientifically "proven", the second, even though it's a weaker version of your original argument, cannot. Not only is the second statement non-scientific (in the sense of being non-falsifiable), but you've explicitly rejected droid's call to cast your argument in a rigorous, logically consistent way. One of the reasons, it seems to me, that droid is getting so annoyed with you is that you are difficult to argue with, not because your arguments are strong, but because you don't seem to understand them.

For instance, "Islam increases the chances of violence": what does that mean? Upthread I tried to prompt you into adopting a different line, that Islam was necessary but not causal to Islamic terrorism. Islam increases the chances of Islamic terrorism -- I don't think anyone can disagree with that (tautology). But how do you know Islam increases the chances of violence? Can you run isolated experiments, as scientists investigating the results of smoking have done? You can not -- you can only make inferrences, and as such you should be extremely careful, not because you might upset the feelings of Islamofascists but because it is highly likely that you are wrong, are using faulty logic, are subject to all sorts of confirmation biases, are ignoring silent evidence and are a victim of epistemic arrogance.It might seem unimportant, but the fact that you can go from "Islam causes violence" to "Islam increases violence" in the same thread is highly dubious from my perspective. And let me remind you, I certainly don't put criticism of regressive Muslim movements beyond the pale. I just want you to present a position I can agree or disagree with.

"Islam increases violence". What is "Islam"? This statement really needs to be unpacked over several threads, yet you show little appreciation for the fact that "Islam" is not any one thing, but many. We need not get into the many modern sects, denominations, movements, schools, borderline heresies and so on, to know that "Islam" is a very broad church. Does traditionally apolitical Shia quietism cause violence? Do the Tekke, the Sufi brotherhoods in Turkey cause vioence? Doesn't seem to be true in either case (in fact, quite the opposite in Iraq). Even this weaker staments needs to be heavily qualified, if you want to make a generalisation I can agree with. One also must be careful not to confuse (as you do throughout this thread) the ethnic with the religious. You put forward the (horrific) stories of Fadela Amara and Samira Bellil, with whom I'm sure we're all already familiar. You observe (or assert) mistreatment of women generally by "Muslims", both in the Netherlands and in majority Muslim countries. But I have no faith that you understand the distinction between what it is to be a "Muslim" and a Muslim. It's something, as I've just said, that the fundamentalists understand very well. I've already linked to the work of Philip Jenkins, who shows that only approximately 5% of French Muslims attend mosque regularly, which he describes as an "almost Anglican sense of detatchment". I have to wonder, the people battering women in your examples, are they battering them because they are Muslims (as you seem to be suggesting)? Are they battering them and they are Muslims (but the two are unconnected, like the praying survivors of the storm)? Or are they battering them and yet they are not even Muslims, but simply come from a community with an origin in a Muslim majority country? It isn't clear, even if your figures are correct.

My problem is not that I don't want to insult poor little immigrants, but that your argument is self-referential: we know Islam is violent, because we see Muslims committing acts of violence, and we know Muslims commit acts of violence because Islam is violent! I understand now that you are Dutch and that some of the confusion is because English is not your first language, but I want you to know that it's the inconsistencies in your argument that I'm attacking, and the (misguided and incorrect) way you apply these to "Islam", not you personally.

 

[vimothy]

A few things for now:

3) quantative studies show that throughout the islamic world and islamic communities in non-islamic countries islamic men beat their wives significantly more than non-islamic men do

Can you post links to some, please?

most theories in sciences like history, anthropology, sociology are not falsifiable (and nothing can be proven either) (even in exact sciences Popper didnt get the acknowledgement you seem to hint at)(did christianity cause capitalism? did europe discover the world and not china because europe was divided?)

Exactly -- so you should very careful about making sweeping generalisations and causal inferrences.

The way you (and others) reason is non-falsifiable as well: even when the only verse in the quran would be "men beat your wives as much as you can" and every muslim man would do just that, and no non-muslim men would beat their wives, you still wouldnt be able to "prove" that the beating these muslim-men give their wives has anything to do with their faith at all. So your statement "islam does not cause violence" can never by falsified

What I actually said was, if Islam causes violence, it also causes non-violence, and so the cause of violence is clearly not Islam but another variable.

 

[vimothy]

This is better:

How to Understand Islam - Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books

 

[vimothy]

(At the risk of resurrecting this argument again...)

@DannyL -- have you read this? A critique of Robert Pape's (basically pretty poor) methodology in The Strategic Logic of Suiciode Terrorism:

Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

 

[DannyL]

No I haven't. I'll read it today. Thanks for that, I just settled down to do some work....